Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The old woman brought out a jug of pulque to them, so that they might refresh themselves. Their eyes were red when they left at sundown, and their breaths and their sweat were sour. But it had made their work go quicker, with snatches of song, and with laughter, and with stumblings of foot. And it had made the earth they shoveled back, the hollow they filled, the tiles they cemented back atop, the roses they brushed against and bent, all dance and blur in fumes of maguey.

But the task was completed, and when the door was closed upon their swaying, drooping-lidded forms, they needed to come back no more.

Seven times the sun rises, seven times it falls. Then fourteen. Then, perhaps, twenty-one. Who knows, who counts it? Hasn’t it risen a thousand years in Anahuac, to fall again, to rise again?

Then one day, in its declining hours, there is a heavy knocking of men’s hands on the outside of the wooden door in the street-wall. The hands of men who have a right to enter, who may not be refused; their knocking tells that.

They know it for what it is at first sound, Chata and the old woman. They have known it was coming. There is another law in Anahuac now than the old one.

Eyes meet eyes. The trace of a nod is exchanged. A nod that confirms. That is all. No fear, no sudden startlement. No fear, because no sense of guilt. The old law did not depend on signs of fear, proofs and evidences, witnesses. The old law was wise, the new law is a fool.

The old woman struggles to her feet, pads forth across the patio toward the street-door, resounding now like a drum. Chata remains as she was, dexterously plaiting withes into a basket, golden-haired child on its back on the sun-cozened ground beside her, little legs fumbling in air.

The old woman comes back with two of mixed blood. Anahuac is in their faces, but so is the other race, with its quick mobility of feature that tells every thought. One in uniform of those who enforce the law, one in attire such as Chata’s own man wears when he has returned from his prospecting trips in the distant mountains and walks the streets of the town with her on Sunday, or takes his ease without her in the cantina with the men of the other women.

They come and stand over her, where she squats at her work, look down on her. Their shadows shade her, blot out the sun in the corner of the patio in which she is. Are like thick blue stripes blanketing her and the child from some intangible serape.

Slowly her eyes go upward to them, liquid, dark, grave, respectful but not afraid, as a woman’s do to strange men who come where she has a right to be.

“Stand. We are of the police. From Tapatzingo, on the other side of the mountain. We are here to speak to you.”

She puts her basket-weaving aside and rises, graceful, unfrightened.

“And you are?” the one who speaks for the two of them, the one without uniform, goes on. “Chata.”

“Any last name?”

“We use no second name among us.” That is the other race, two names for every one person.

“And the old one?”

“Mother of Chata.”

“And who is the man here?”

“In the mountains. That way, far that way. He goes to look for silver. He works it when he finds it. He has been long gone, but he will come soon now, the time is drawing near.”

“Now listen. A woman entered here, some time three weeks ago. A woman with a child. A nortena, a gringa, understand? One of those from up there. She has not been seen again. She did not go back there to where she came from. To the great City of Mexico. In the City of Mexico the consul of her country has asked the police to find out where she is. The police of the City of Mexico have asked us to learn what became of her.”

Both heads shake. “No. No woman entered here.”

He turns to the one in uniform. “Bring him in a minute.”

The hired-car driver shuffles forward, escorted by the uniform.

Chata looks at him gravely, no more. Gravely but untroubledly.

“This man says he brought her here. She got out. He went back without her.”

Both heads nod now. The young one that their eyes are on, the old one disregarded in the background.

“There was a knock upon our door, one such day, many days ago. A woman with a child stood there, from another place. She spoke, and we could not understand her speech. She showed us a paper, but we cannot read writing. We closed the door. She did not knock again.”

He turns on the hired-car driver. “Did you see them admit her?”

“No, Señor,” the latter falters, too frightened to tell anything but the truth. “I only let her out somewhere along here. I did not wait to see where she went. It was late, and I wanted to get back to my woman. I had driven her all the way from Tapatzingo, where the train stops.”

“Then you did not see her come in here?”

“I did not see her go in anywhere. I turned around and went the other way, and it was getting dark.”

“This child here, does it look like the one she had with her?”

“I could not see it, she held it to her.”

“This is the child of my man,” Chata says with sultry dignity. “He has yellow hair like this. Tell, then.”

“Her man is gringo, everyone has seen him. She had a gringo child a while ago, everyone knows that,” the man stammers unhappily.

“Then you, perhaps, know more about where she went, than these two do! You did bring her out this way! Take him outside and hold him. At least I’ll have something to report on.”

The policeman drags him out again, pleading and whining. “No, Señor, no! I do not know — I drove back without her! For the love of God, Señor, the love of God!”

He turns to Chata. “Show me this house. I want to see it.”

She shows it to him, room by room. Rooms that know nothing, can tell nothing. Then back to the patio again. The other one is waiting for him there, alone now.

“And this pozo? It seems cleaner, newer, this tiling, than elsewhere around it.” He taps his foot on it.

“It kept falling in, around the sides. Cement was put around them to hold the dirt back.”

“Who had it done?”

“It was the order of my man, before he left. It made our water bad. He told two men to do it for him while he was away.”

“And who carried it out?”

“Fulgencio and his nephew, in the town. They did not come right away, and they took long, but finally they finished.”

He jotted the name. “We will ask.”

She nodded acquiescently. “They will tell.”

He takes his foot off it at last, moves away. He seems to be finished, he seems to be about to go. Then suddenly, curtly, “Come.” And he flexes his finger for her benefit.

For the first time her face shows something. The skin draws back rearward of her eyes, pulling them oblique.

“Where?” she whispers.

“To the town. To Tapatzingo. To the headquarters.”

She shakes her head repeatedly, mutely appalled. Creeps backward a step with each shake. Yet even now it is less than outright fear; it is more an unreasoning obstinacy. An awe in the face of something one is too simple to understand. The cringing of a wide-eyed child.

“Nothing will happen to you,” he says impatiently. “You won’t be held. Just to sign a paper. A statement for you to put your name to.”

Her back has come to rest against one of the archway supports now. She can retreat no further. She cowers against it, then sinks down, then turns and clasps her arms about it, holding onto it in desperate appeal.

“I cannot write. I do not know how to make those marks.”

He is standing over her now, trying to reason with her.

“Valgame dios! What a criatura!”

She transfers her embrace suddenly from the inanimate pilaster to his legs, winding her arms about them in supplication.